Real-time edge framework (RTEF): task scheduling and realisation

With the big success of the Cloud Computing, or the Cloud, new research areas appeared. Edge Computing (EC) is one of the recent paradigms that is expected to overcome the Quality of Service (QoS) and latency issues caused by the best-effort behaviour of the Cloud. EC aims to bring the computation power close to the end devices as much as possible and reduce the dependency to the Cloud. Bringing computing power close to the source also enables real-time applications. In this paper, we propose a novel software reference architecture for Edge Servers, which is operating system (OS) and hardware-agnostic. Edge Servers can collaborate and execute (near) real-time tasks on time, either by downscaling or scheduling them according to their deadlines or offloading them to other Edge Servers in the network. Decision making for offloading, resource planning, and task scheduling are challenging problems in decentralized systems. The paper explains how resource planning and task scheduling can be overcome with software approach. Finally, the article realises the architecture as a framework, called Real-Time Edge Framework (RTEF) and validates its correctness with a use case.